


Break and Heal

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Apologies, Broken Bones, Brothers, Dysfunctional Family, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Forgiveness, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 13:10:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16219721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Missing scene for 2x07. Waiting for news on Danny in the hospital, Ward can't help thinking back to when they were kids, and a different time that Danny broke a limb. Maybe it's not too late for redemption, but there's a hell of a lot of water under the bridge between them.





	Break and Heal

**Author's Note:**

> This is for my h/c bingo "betrayal" square, and for a wonderfully inspiring prompt on Tumblr:
> 
> _For the prompts, remember in S1 of Iron Fist where Danny remembers he has a medical record because he broke his arm skateboarding or something? And when the documents got destroyed by a goon, he knew it was Ward's doing and accused him because apparently Ward was the only one who knew about it??? So idk what's your take on that? (Could imagine Ward accidentally causing the injury by impulsively pushing Danny, then felt bad and brought him to the hospital. Tho if you have a diff idea go with it!)_

It was too much like that time a year ago when he'd brought Joy into the hospital. The same stark corridors with harsh blue-white lights, the same smells of cleaning chemicals and stale coffee ... the same buzzed sense of not enough sleep. At least this time he wasn't coming down off heroin withdrawal, and he wasn't directly responsible. Small favors, Ward thought grimly, looking down at the paper cup of coffee in his hands. He took a sip, but the taste of too-old coffee made from cheap grounds reminded him unpleasantly of NA meetings. Not exactly a step up from his dark thoughts, just a different track in the same trainyard.

"Hey." Colleen poked his arm with a clipboard. "We need your help. You know more about Danny's medical history than I do."

"Yeah," he said, on a breath, putting the cup aside. It gave him something useful to do. Something to think about, other than Danny in surgery. "Gimme."

Colleen handed him the clipboard. Misty cleared her throat and the two women had a soft conversation. Ward focused on trying to remember Danny's medical history as best he could. Not that he had the slightest clue what had happened during Danny's magic carpet ride in K'un Lun ... which was basically Danny's entire life. But at least up 'til Danny was aged 10, he could hit the high points.

That broken arm, for one.

_Have you ever been hospitalized or had major surgery?_

Ward grimaced and pressed down hard enough that the ballpoint pen tore the paper as he scribbled a brief explanation. _Hospitalized for broken arm, age 8._

Danny's accusations from last year came back to him. _You were the only one with me the day I broke my arm, Ward ..._

Damn straight, Ward thought. I sure was. I'm the only person who knows about that because I did it.

He moved the pen down the row of ticky boxes. Asthma, no. Cancer, no. Colleen had already checked "no" on a bunch of them.

His eyes kept drifting back to that damning line. He bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood.

So ... they'd been eight and thirteen, then. Joy was with their parents somewhere; he didn't even remember why it had been just the two of them, with Ward nominally the responsible older child in charge. The babysitter.

_A selfish, jealous little shit, is what I was._

He was the one who'd talked Danny into riding his skateboard down the steps to the street. Ward had sworn that he'd done it himself dozens of times (a total lie). And Danny had stood poised at the top of the steps, a skinny eight-year-old who even at that age had a physical grace that Ward, gawky and awkward, often envied. 

He'd stood behind Danny and realized that the little shit was gonna do it, he was going to do that thing Ward himself was terrified of, and he was going to do it _well,_ because that was exactly the kind of thing Danny seemed to be able to do without even trying. It wasn't enough that he had two parents to love and coddle him. He was goddamn good at everything else too.

And Ward had kicked the skateboard out from under him.

He knew he'd gone too far even as he'd done it. He'd known it even before the sick crack, audible when Danny bounced off the concrete steps and tumbled down to the sidewalk. He'd already known it in that instant when Danny was airborne, and it could have been any part of him that hit: his skull, his neck. 

And Ward had stood there with his stomach rolling up into a ball of sickness and shame and pure terror. When Danny hit, when he rolled down to the sidewalk and started to cry, Ward's first reaction had been a rush of relief that turned his knees to water. He hadn't killed him. _He hadn't killed him._

He'd wrapped up Danny in his jacket and called a cab to take them to the hospital, and had made Danny swear to a new version of the story in which there was no skateboard involved, no egging on from the older child in that scenario. According to the version they were both going to tell their parents, Danny had tripped and fallen down the stairs. 

The whole time, sitting there on the sidewalk, with Danny clinging to him tearfully and sniffling out the new, blame-free version of the story, Ward had wondered: did Danny _know?_ Did he think the skateboard had gone out from under him all on its own? To this day, Ward still didn't know, and getting to know Danny better wasn't much of a help. He could totally believe that Danny was naive enough, blind enough, trusting enough not to connect the dots between Ward standing behind him and the skateboard shooting out to the side as if its wheels had been greased. And he could just as easily believe that Danny was goddamn _forgiving_ enough that he knew and just didn't care.

Danny had clung to Ward's hand all the way to the hospital in the back of the cab, and kept clinging to it while he was X-rayed and his parents were called and he was installed in a hospital room for an overnight stay. He'd hung on like Ward was some kind of fucking lifeline. Ward had stayed with him for hours until their parents got there, and Danny had actually cried, he'd _cried_ when Ward had to leave.

And the whole time Ward didn't know if Danny knew Ward was the reason why he was there or not.

"Hey," a voice said above his head, "hey, Meachum," and a warm, strong hand settled on his shoulder. He jerked, the pen skidding across the paper from a ticky box he didn't remember checking. 

"Whoa, there." Misty looked down at him with a slight frown. "You good? Hanging in there?"

"I'm not the one in surgery with a broken leg," Ward said, hearing the edge in his own voice.

"No, but believe it or not, it's harder to be on this side of it. Take it from me, as a veteran of more than a few late-night vigils." She gave his shoulder a firm squeeze before letting go. "I'm heading out. Gonna go down to the station, ask some questions, then go home. You good here?"

"Fine." He glanced around, taking a breath, waking himself up. "Colleen still here?"

"She took a walk to the nurse's station. I told her I was going home. Told her to go get some sleep herself, though I don't know if she'll listen, and now I'm telling you the same thing. You can't be Danny's support system if you're running on fumes."

 _How about being the guy who kicked him down the stairs when he was eight?_ said that dark little corner of Ward's brain that always sounded like his dad. _You need a good night's sleep for that?_

But what he said was, "Yeah, sure. I'll do that."

She gave him a skeptical little smile, and he could see that she didn't believe him for a minute, but with a short wave from her mechanical hand, she breezed out.

Ward leaned back against the wall and finished filling in the form. When Colleen came back, he handed it to her without speaking.

Time to go home. No point in staying here.

He stayed.

 

***

 

There was no reason to stay until daybreak.

There was no reason to go in and see Danny either. He was lingering around the coffee machine when the nurse got Colleen and took her in to Recovery. He was still lingering there when Colleen came out, gathered her jacket, and left. He was pretty sure she thought he'd gone home hours ago.

He _ought_ to go home.

"Hey," he said, gathering up the ragged edges of what courage he had left after a hell of a long night. "Danny Rand ... I'm his brother? Can I see him?"

No checking IDs, apparently; nobody seemed to care that he was ... lying? Maybe just not telling all of the truth ( _the best lies have a grain of truth,_ Dad always said). They took him into the back and left him with a pale, fragile version of Danny screwed together with braces and metal.

There really was no point in being here. The nurse had told him Danny was in and out, but at the moment, he was definitely "out." Still, Ward lingered ... like he'd lingered all night. Thinking about that eight-year-old kid who cried when Ward had to leave his hospital room.

"I'm sorry, Danny," he murmured, brushing the backs of his fingers across Danny's cool, limp hand.

_Sorry I wasn't there when you needed me. Sorry I was such a shit to you when we were kids. Sorry I'm a lousy excuse for a brother._

_Sorry I didn't stop you from running off with Walker and almost getting yourself killed. That's on me._

Though, rationally speaking, he wasn't sure what he could have done to stop him. Danny with his mind made up was an immovable object. What was he supposed to do, sit on him? The mental image made him smile, for the first time all night.

His knuckles were still resting against the back of Danny's hand, when he felt that hand twitch, and Danny rolled his head to the side.

The vague thoughts of leaving that had been floating around in his head ( _breakfast, bed, decent coffee_ ) fled. "Hey ... Danny?"

"Nnnnn." Danny's eyes fluttered open, and he grinned, warm and soft ... and probably drugged to his eyeballs. "Ward," he said sleepily.

"Hey there." Ward pressed his knuckles against Danny's. Danny's hand stirred and then twisted around and curled to wrap around Ward's -- not all that different from when he was eight.

"Colleen was here," Danny murmured. "She was ... wasn't she?"

"She was. She went home to get some sleep. You oughta sleep too."

"Mmmm. Okay. Yeah." Danny's eyes fluttered shut and then opened again, his gaze sharpening and focusing a little. "They let you back here, huh?"

"Told 'em I was your brother. Nobody checked."

"Sure you are," Danny mumbled, brushing his thumb over the back of Ward's hand. "Sure. Yeah. You are though."

"Some damn brother," Ward said, and Danny's eyes, drifting toward shut, opened again. "I let you go out there. Let you get hurt."

Danny blinked, visibly fighting against sleep. "What you gonna do? Try to stop me, prob'ly get kung fu'd to the floor."

"Oh yeah, you were absolutely in shape to do that."

"Says you and what black belt?"

"Really, Danny? Are we really doing this?"

Danny laughed soundlessly and rolled his head against the pillow, and Ward couldn't help thinking that Danny, drugged, was kind of adorable. Of _course_ he was. Ward, drugged, was an unlovable mess. Danny just got sweet and puppylike.

Hard to feel bothered by it, though, when the little shit was gonna be okay.

"Hey," Ward said, pressing Danny's hand down to the blanket, and Danny opened his eyes again. "You get some rest, all right? I'll be back later. First I'm gonna chase down some technicians at Rand and get you the best goddamn assistive tech our money can buy. And we have a _lot_ of money."

"Mmm. Okay. You'll do good." Danny clumsily patted at Ward's hand with his opposite hand.

_Yeah, like when I kicked a skateboard out from under you ..._

"Danny ..." he said, and then stopped, pulling himself up short on the verge of apologizing for something that had happened almost twenty years ago.

Because there was no point, was there? It was for himself that he wanted to apologize, to assuage his own guilt. Whether Danny had never realized Ward was the one who'd hurt him, or whether he'd known it all along and long ago made peace with it, it wasn't like dredging it up was going to do anything except hurt him more. Especially at a time like now.

 _No,_ he thought, _you get to carry this one, Ward, so he doesn't have to. Because it was never his to carry in the first place._

He couldn't save Danny from getting hurt, then or now. But he could do this for him.

"Mmm?" Danny made a faint, inquiring noise, blinking sleepily. "You saying somethin'?"

Not anymore. But it'd been a hell of a long night, and he was teetering on the edge of an emotional precipice anyway, and what came out was what he hadn't said when Danny was eight.

"I'm glad you're all right." He bent over the bed, curling forward as if he was in pain, suddenly hardly able to stand. His hand tightened on Danny's, and he lifted Danny's hand and pressed it to his forehead. "I'm glad, I'm glad, I'm so _glad,_ Danny."

"Hey. Whoa." Danny half raised his head off the pillow; his other hand came around to curl around the back of Ward's neck in a sort of clumsy halfway hug. "I'm okay. Really. Hey, it's not your fault, man. Not your fault."

 _Yes, it was. It is._ But he couldn't _say_ that. He'd decided not to. Instead he gulped down a few breaths and squeezed Danny's hand until he could finally put it back down. He extricated himself out from under Danny's other hand, and laid it back down across Danny's chest -- limp, totally limp, because it looked like Danny had gone out again while he was, of all the goddamn things, trying to comfort _Ward._

 _Good bedside manner you got there,_ he thought at himself, but still he hung onto Danny's hand for awhile, until finally a nurse came to chase him off so they could take Danny to his room, and then Ward went off to get some work done, not without a few backwards glances.

Best damn assistive tech money could buy, damn straight.


End file.
